Kent and Medway Integrated Care System (ICS) has gone live with its shared care record – the CareCentric system from Graphnet.
The Kent and Medway Care Record (KMCR) was commissioned by NHS Kent and Medway CCG, Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, Kent County Council and Medway Council. It will provide the area’s health and care professionals with secure access to patient data, collected from multiple health and care organisations, which will be collated in one central hub.
The system brings together information from a number of settings, including four acute hospital trusts, three community-based providers, two mental health services, the South East Ambulance Service and 198 GP practices, in addition to Kent County Council and Medway Council’s children’s and adults’ social care teams.
It’s hoped that, with a wider range of data available at the point of care, the information shared will ‘drive better outcomes and experiences’ for citizens and ‘allow health and care professionals to make better informed decisions’, as well as enabling the delivery of more ‘joined up and proactive care’.
The KMCR project includes a dedicated COVID-19 summary to ‘flag a patient’s infection and vaccine status’, if applicable, while COVID-19 dashboards are being developed to provide ‘comprehensive views of infections, hospitalisations, deaths and vaccinations’ and support decision-making.
Planning is also underway for the implementation of population health management tools and the inclusion of an additional function for people living in Kent and Medway to be able to access key information from their own care records, through the KMCR patient portal.
Dr Navin Kumta, Clinical Chair of Kent and Medway CCG, said: “The KMCR is delivering a significant transformational change in Kent and Medway. As well as helping us improve frontline care, the KMCR underpins our drive to integrate care across the system.”
Brian Waters, Chief Executive at Graphnet, commented: “I’m delighted we could assist Kent and Medway with this major programme to join up services across the region’s care community. We are now looking forward to the second phase, bringing the care community the benefits of population health management and giving citizens across Kent and Medway access to their own records.”
According to Graphnet, Kent and Medway is the third system to go live with CareCentric over the last year, following deployments at Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire, and Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent.
Last summer, HTN also reported that Northamptonshire Health and Care Partnership chose Graphnet Health’s CareCentric integrated care record to support and connect its GP practices, hospitals and out-of-hours service providers, as well as Northamptonshire County Council Social Care and the East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust.
